Many people read about the various people talking in forums and internet websites about the Chinese language and how tough it is to learn. This makes people who are really interested in learning the language lose confidence about their capability to learn the language. In this article, I will be writing to you about how to learn Chinese easy and how you too can master the language with a couple of quick and easy steps. However, there are also many guides available online which have more information regarding this as well. Make sure that you check those as well to ensure you are making the best use of the technology available to you.
Now, many people may find that the Chinese characters are really complicated and are made up of strokes and lines that are difficult to replicate and write. But the fact is that this was exactly what prompted the Chinese government to change the traditional Chinese characters into something even simplified. This was one of the big changes that took place in 1986. Even today, there are more than 4000 Chinese characters. But, it is said that before the simplification process took place, there were more than 40000 characters of which at least 2000 characters got simplified. The same holds true with the characters that were not actually simplified. Some of them remained the same as before and some of them had been changed to characters that looked totally different from their parent characters and the rest were changed into new characters that were slightly different (by a stroke or line) from the parent characters.
Critics and various experts say that these changes were brought about in an effort to end the high illiteracy levels that plagued in the then China. This was good news for most people living in China until then because it mean that they could learn Chinese easy. However, this was implemented mostly in mainland China (now, the People's Republic of China) and other countries such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore which used Chinese as one of their official languages did not immediately implement this and the debate still goes on in these countries.
But what does this mean to you as a potential learner who is looking to learn the language. I would suggest that you consider what use you are going to be making use of this newly learnt language for. If you are planning to travel to a country like Hong Kong where still traditional characters are made use of, I would suggest that you look into learning traditional characters and keep the simplified characters for next time.
Now that we have explored in detail how the simplification helps immensely to learn Chinese easy, let us take a look at some of the other factors. One of the other biggest rumours that people talk about is the pronunciation of the language and how it is hard. I would agree with them and say that it was pretty tough until the Pinyin system came about. Pinyin was the system introduced to make it easy to pronounce Chinese characters for Westerners by using the English alphabets. This was officially introduced by Beijing and the government of the People's Republic of China a couple of decades back. So pinyin has made it extremely easy for most people who are familiar with the Western languages to learn Chinese easy. I hope that this article helped you and motivated you to learn the Chinese language.
For more information, head over to a related article at Learn Chinese Easy and the author's blog at Learn Chinese Online.